Sarah Palin and North Korea

I'm not a Palin-phile but that doesn't mean that she shouldn't be defended from the garbage the media is throwing her way.

Obama misspeaks and says "57 states" and nobody bats an eye. And rightfully so. But Palin misspeaks and it becomes international news.

Looks at the headlines:

SARAH PALIN MAKES GAFFE, SAYING NORTH KOREA IS US ALLY

Former Alaskan governor and potential 2012 presidential contender Sarah Palin has made a gaffe on a radio show by saying North Korea is a US ally.

A review of the transcript shows that it was a mis-statement. One thing that's for certain Sarah Palin is much tougher, much more comfortable in dealing with a critical press, and, I think, much better at handling tough situations than President "voted present" Obama.

The transcript of the interview is below:

PAT: Sarah, you said in the last few days that you are considering a run for president.

SARAH PALIN: Yes.

PAT: And polls show that you would probably win the Republican nomination. How would you handle a situation like just developed in North Korea?

SARAH PALIN: Well, North Korea, this is stemming from I think a greater problem when we're all sitting around asking, "Oh, no, what are we going to do" and we're not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea's going to do. So this speaks to a bigger picture here that certainly scares me in terms of our national security policies. But obviously got to stand with our North Korean allies. We're bound to by treaty. We're also bound to by ‑‑

STU: South Korea.

SARAH PALIN: Yeah. And we're also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes. And, you know, to remind North Korea, well, we're not going to reward bad behavior and we're not going to walk away and we do need to press China to do more to increase pressure on that arena.

Obviously this was an informal conversation and she misspoke. Imagine though, that Sarah Palin was in Austria and said that "she didn't know the term in Austrian."

Should that comment by Obama automatically be taken as a misstatement? No. Imagine the outcry had Sarah Palin made the exact same statement.

Look at the accompanying photo: can we get a more unflattering picture of Sarah Palin than that? Why try to evoke images of Hitler and other dictators? "Oh, I know, I know": because the BBC is trying to implant this image, and yet maintain a pretense of objectivity by including this last paragraph in their article:

The conservative US website The Weekly Standard came to Ms Palin's defence, pointing out that "she correctly identified North Korea as our enemy literally eight seconds before the mix-up".

Once again we see the objective media at their best.

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EDIT: 11/27/2010
What follows is an audio file of Sarah Palin's comments:

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